Tag: Nonfiction

We’d bought the beer and ice at a gas station near Parachute, Colorado. I stood with the pump while my father acquired the goods. I was a couple years off the buying age, although I had a decent fake in my wallet. I laid a bed of ice in the ... Read More

The road stretched straight and flat before me, like you’d see in a sports car commercial or a Dennis Hopper movie. On either side, the land spread wide and open. Not quite flat–with a bit of a roll here and there–dotted continuously with juniper and other unidentifiable desert shrubs. I ... Read More

Halloween is and always has been my favorite holiday. I love dressing up, I love the chilly autumn nights, and I love the spookiness that hangs in the air throughout October. I love driving through my neighborhood and seeing houses that have been transformed into haunted mansions, seeing lawns transformed ... Read More

Seven bowls of rice sit on my host-family’s Chuseok (South Korean Thanksgiving) table, one for each of them and me. To my right is a plate of sweet, soy- and sugar-glazed lotus roots—light brown, and shaped like a child’s drawing of a flower. Crunchy and crumbly, the roots taste almost ... Read More

I’ll be honest. I was never really interested in superheroes as a kid. Comics were something that boys read, and besides, they were all a bunch of beefy men beating each other up anyway, so what was I really missing? As I came of age, so too did superheroes, it ... Read More

When all this started—this was my first memory of Jim: the director and actors were all assembled, sitting around a table in the main room of Graham Memorial Hall—off a quad called McCorkle Place on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The big, airy room was where classes, ... Read More

In Western society, we love binaries. Whether we’re talking about gender (man/woman), sexuality (straight/gay), race (white/black), or even pets (dog/cat), we love being able to sort things as either one thing or the other with no in-between. It makes everything simpler. If you aren’t one thing, then you’re the other, ... Read More

Keeping Score by Kevin Brown In my neighborhood, my friends played sports year-round: football in the fall; basketball in winter and spring; and baseball in the summer. Most of the time, I’d join them, and we tried almost any sport we saw. After seeing field hockey in the early days ... Read More

"Nonfiction is a work or genre of prose works that describe actual, as opposed to imaginary or fictional, characters and events. Subgenres of nonfiction include biography, memoir, and the essay." (The Norton Anthology of World Literature: Literary Terms) ... Read More

Eckleburg: What drives, inspires, and feeds your artistic work? Dawn S. Davies: Jaco Pastorius, Richard Fenyman, my family, people who jump off bridges for fun, people who can make art out of blocks of ice, bees, Mark Knopfler, the memory of my childhood Big Wheel, the person who told me ... Read More

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She is the most beautiful dead woman I have ever seen. Her lashes, long and thick, kiss her magnificent cheekbones. Brown hair billows around her shapely face. She is stylish, lean legs thrust into fur boots, head crowned with a jauntily tilted hat. When I first see her picture, I am ... Read More

JASON DUFFY EATS YOUR FRIENDS (and I do love it stylized in all-caps -- it looks so much more ridiculous that way) has been a passion project for me. On its surface, it's the story of a fat, agoraphobic, naive but gentle man named Ray. But to me, this story ... Read More

I’m sure I saw the light dimming and the trees outside swooning, swimming. I could, perhaps, blame it on the jungle. On the disorientations of being so close to the equator, on the suffocation of being wrapped in strangler figs, on the isolation of being in a land where my ... Read More

When I meet Leo Shipp (author of Pick), he is in his garret; humming, reading an atlas. “When did you read Crash, by J.G. Ballard,” I interview him. “University,” he says. “Please,” I say, “stop humming.” He hums all the more tenaciously. I realize his atlas is missing its countries ... Read More

In the middle of a downtown street, a woman wearing red forms a focus—an apex—in a picture of shifting motion, a crowd moving, other buildings overlaid on the original scene. But the woman is constant, her red outfit standing out. Seeing with the camera lens has freed photographer Harry Callahan, ... Read More

Palm Desert. “Here’s a new package of Titleist balls - orange – so you don’t confuse your drive with mine.” Dad shoots me a wink. “Trust me honey, they’re the best balls for performance. And I know my balls.” Another wink. He shoves some tees in my pocket and heads ... Read More

As a native Floridian, who lived in Orlando for five years, I have often driven passed Disney’s unincorporated town Celebration. Stylized building facades -- Mediterranean, French Victorian, and Colonial Revival -- force community charm. In 2010, around 7,420 people lived there as permanent residents. There’s even a public school on the property ... Read More

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The first time I laid eyes on him was in Agriculture Class and we were both assigned the task of filling sausage skins together. Other students were paired up and assigned different tasks, cutting ribs from pigs, cleaning up scraps as they fell to the floor, air packing steaks and ... Read More

Before I started writing full-time, I had a corporate sales job. I sat in a cubicle for eight hours a day, managing the delivery of products that I would never use to places that I would never visit. The job was routinized. There were specific tasks that needed to be ... Read More

This poem began, as many of my poems do, with an image. Not just an image, but the words to express them, as well. “Maria is under the sink again.” The sentence lodged in my mind, rattled around in there as I thought and wrote about other things -- whether there was ... Read More

“Tell me what we were doing the morning we were leaving Cancun,” my husband asks, a week after we returned from a vacation. “We were waiting in the hotel bar for the van to take us to the airport,” I reply. “Did we order French toast?” “What? -- There was no ... Read More

The sun melted into my arms and back as I walked into the darkness of The Rose. I sensed the place never closed and the stink of liquor and cigarettes hit me as soon as I entered. My eyes screwed up in a squint. There was another smell too, which ... Read More

Recently, I have become obsessed with examining colloquialisms, particularly in supposedly intimate dialogues. So often, I feel we censor ourselves, even when we are talking to those closest to us—for me, the subway is my main inspiration, because I literally overhear how people live, how they survive. Through overhearing these ... Read More

Guns. A divisive bullet between British and American cultures. If I had one, I would hold up this C2C Quiet Zone until the perpetrator of the seeping sewage confessed. It’s a cornea piercing stench that doesn’t move when the train doors open at Pitsea, Basildon, or Benfleet. Those of us ... Read More

To me, flash fiction is characterized above all by the extraordinary compression of its form. In its extreme incarnation, flash borderlines narrative poetry and is even mistaken for it sometimes. The flash story is lifted by intense feelings, situations and actions, and takes off and up and up, but never ... Read More

Weeks after my girlfriend ended our relationship of seven years, I moved from the island side to a quieter, greener part of Hong Kong, hemmed by country parks, opposite a reservoir. She ended up moving to a nearby block on the same street. Together we had accumulated three stray dogs ... Read More

Some years ago now, my daughter found a possum skull partly buried in the woods behind our house. She was sixteen. She dislodged the skull from the earth with her fingers, washed it with a hose, then left it on a retaining wall by the back driveway. I could see ... Read More

“I have grown determined to prove that the art of literature is more resilient than what menaces it. The best defense of literary freedoms lies in their exercise, in continuing to make untrammeled, uncowed books.” Joseph Anton, aka Salman Rushdie By 1989, Norman Mailer was championing an ex-ad man who ... Read More